The works of Francis Bacon started to amaze me a while ago with the way in which they seem to capture a movement in a completely unique and unreal way. Especially his portraits do fascinate me because they arise from his personal feeling and idea of that person rather then from its actual looks. He expresses his approach as a way of remarking all the areas of feeling which he himself has apprehensions of (Sylvester, 2009).

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“You know in my case all painting – and the older I get, the more it becomes so – is accident. So I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. […] Perhaps one could say it’s not an accident, because it becomes a selective process which part of this accident one chooses to preserve. One is attempting, of course, to keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity.” - Francis Bacon in Sylvester, 2009, p.17

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Through this reading I learned that a lot in painting can only be opened up if you just start with it. The power and attraction of the unplannable are factors that I had hardly included in my work before, that I had even consciously counteracted, but that can increase and enhance the direct expressiveness of the work. I was very fascinated by Francis Bacon's willingness to make mistakes and to react to what appears on the canvas through one's own impulses. He talks about how he is constantly struggling not to lose his work through the creative process and his own intervention by adding too much to what chance or fortune has brought to the work.

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"I've been trying to work like this lately, and I think there are all sorts of possibilities that bring you a lot further in first working straight ahead and then, later, using what chance or accident has brought to you." - Francis Bacon in Sylvester, 2009, p.20

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I connect this approach to the current attempt to transfer and implement the human understanding and intelligence onto algorithms. In this times the attempt is put into action to define the decision-making ability of humans and thus to create a reliable structure for artificial intelligence to work with. I see this artificial imitation of logical decision-making processes as a similar attempt to find patterns in chance and to understand how it arises in order to define the right reaction to it.

Data scientist Benjamin Aunkofer defines this structuring of decisions as decision trees, an idea of human-monitored machine learning in which algorithms are used. An algorithm is the unambiguous rule for the solution of a problem or several related problems. These regulations can then be converted into a Computer program to be implemented. The goal of an algorithm is to use a volume of data to create a hierarchical structure with as few decision-making paths as possible (Aunkofer, 2017).

Inspired by this thought, I also began to experiment with the accident and tried to react to it. In doing so I noticed how difficult it is to leave enough room in the painting for the accident to come trough while communicating my initial idea. As a result of this difficulty I feel like I have been to hesitant to paint over the parts where the quality of the accident was very visible resulting in a final work that has stayed a bit too close to the accident and does not display my idea as clearly to the viewer as I had intended it.

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